Pages

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The Deck Out goes global: Spain

Burgos Cathedral in Burgos, Spain

Hi everyone!

As promised, this week, I’ll be making 3 entries and that’s why there will be another
entry already today. I’ve been very busy during the last few weeks so I’m happy
to get back to normal rhytm and concentrate on the blog.

Today’s The Deck Out goes global’s country is a country, which I’ve personally
visited – Spain. Did you even know that Spain had an Organized Play? I didn’t
and in fact they don’t even have a one! However, that doesn’t stop them from
playing Pokémon TCG and hoping that once their community is big enough, they’ll
one day have an Organized Play in their country, which will lure even more
players into the community. So, let’s look what The Deck Out goes global has in
store for today!

SPAIN

Population: 46 million
The most famous living person: Enrique Iglesias
The most famous company: SEAT
Currency: EuroFun fact: Bullfighting is considered an art as well as a sport and popular
attraction. It is also the biggest and most controversial sport in Spain and is
an integral part of Spanish history, art and culture with bull rings in all
major cities and beyond.

Local Player Profile

My sources for this entry is a 12-years old Spanish player who has
been playing the Pokémon TCG for 3 years and a 20-year old Spanish player who
has played for one year. The 12-year old player is studying at Secondary School
and he enjoys playing both Pokémon TCG and Pokémon Video games. He has won the
Videogame Nationals of Spain in 2010. The 20-year old source is currently
studying Fine Arts career at university.

It’s good to have two sources that are so different from each other because
that way, I can get a realistic and two different points of view into Spanish
Pokémon TCG.

Non-competitive playing and leagues

First of all, Organized Play doesn’t exist in Spain. I
was very surprised to see so many Spanish players in ECC because of that.
However, I guess all you need is Great Spirit of the Game and community and you
are able to get players into Pokémon, no matter where you live. Since Spain
doesn’t have Organized Play, they don’t have any official tournaments like BR,
CCs, States or Even Nationals.

However, there is a very lively Pokémon TCG community in Spain in some card
stores for example in Madrid and Barcelona. In those stores, they
Spanish players buy the Pokémon singles, booster packs, boxes, tins etc. and
play and organize tournaments.

In Spain, there are no official leagues either since there is no organized
play. The Madrilean players are working hard to change this fact by proving
their competitive prowess. Popular Pokémon TCG-dedicated websites like
SixPrizes and The Deck Out have helped them to stay updated on decks used in
the current metagame around the world.

In Madrid, they have Pokémon TCG tournaments every week, Wednesdays and
Saturdays. Each Wednesday there are about 9 or 10 people, but on Saturdays
there are around 18 players. They use the current format to play, but in other
communities they play with DP-On or EX Ruby and Sapphire-On since the
tournaments aren’t official.

There aren’t a lot of competitive decks in Spain due
the fact that not everyone is playing with the official format and most
importantly, there aren't enough players that play the Pokémon TCG card game to
have enough competitive decks.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere at Spanish tournaments is neither
relaxed nor competitive, well, it also depends of the players that are
attending to the tournament. If the most of the tournament players are very
well-known players because of winning many tournaments, there is a tense
atmosphere, if not, it's quiet.

People take care of their cards and decks when playing or trading, but
some young kids left their cards on tables when playing or going to buy
anything.

The atmosphere is mostly laid back, but Spanish players do get very competitive
during matches because it’s a race to get that valuable cards everyone wants.
By playing according the current format metagame, they improve their skills in
order to prepare for the official international tournaments. This is part of
their commitment to get organized play in Spain as soon as possible. Of course,
they don’t forget the fact that they are playing to have fun, to relax and
spend a good time with the rest of the group. Also, players don’t have any
problem in lending their cards to other players.

Competitive playing and tournament organizing

TPCi is sending Spanish players the English material
and also Spanish one, but most players prefer the English cards due to the
scarce Spanish legal sets, which are: HGSS-UL-BW-EP.

The game is getting better in Spain; TPCi is thinking
about visiting one of the tournaments in Spain and then think again, if it
would be a good idea making an OP in Spain.

The number of tournaments depends on the area,
Barcelona and Canary Islands have very few tournaments per month, but Madrid
has them every week.

The tournament's organizers are always the same - the boss of the store - which
the tournament is taking place organizes all the tournaments-

Spain’s local distributor is Asmodee. The company started giving Spanish
players Pokémon TCG material with HGSS, before this, they had a horrible
distributor called Panini, who gave them misprinted cards and not giving them
important sets such as MD,RR,SV,AR etc.

Spanish players communicate and talk about Pokémon TCG in a website
called www.cartaspokemon.es . Players who read English use sites like SixPrizes, The Deck Out and
PokeGym. Spanish players also have their own blog and forums, Pokémon
Supporters (www.pokemonsupporters.com), where they offer the latest news of the TCG in Spanish, tournaments,
decklists, articles on future expansions, etc. In the forums, Spanish players discuss in
depth about any TCG-related topic about the current or future format.

Most players are creative due to the high price of some cards and make their
own Rogue decks. People who built Tier 1/Tier 2 decks are also creative since
they put in unbelievable techs - in my source’s opinion - that work for most match-ups.

Additionally for Madrid, there are also tournaments in Jerez, Tarragona,
Valencia and Tenerife. Twice a month, there are tournaments in Barcelona, but
they only play with cards in Spanish, so they are lagging behind the current
format. What Spainlacks are official league leaders and professors to get every
city coordinated to the same level.

To stay with the current format, Spanish players have to import English
cards, but even then they have some troubles to get material. By the time when
ECC was just around the corner, a big shipment of Next Destinies was supposed
to arrive a week before the ECC, but only SOME OF IT had arrived ONE DAY BEFORE
THE flight DEPARTURE to Arnhem. All players were quickly opening packs so they
could lend the Mewtwos to the Spanish team. Thankfully, for Spanish players,
there is such thing as team work.

Player base

The average number of people that comes to our tournaments is around 14
people and the number is increasing since Pokémon TCG is gaining more popularity
at Spain.

However, the truth is that their entire country can't compete in Worlds
because right now if a player wins a match against someone, almost every time
he'll win against that guy. There are no more than at least 50 players that
play competitive decks and most of them are from the Master Division, so the
only Spanish' competitors that could make their way to TOP-xx of world would
belong to Masters age division. In my sources’ opinion, the game has to
increase faster than it's doing if Spanish players want to do well in every age
division in the Worlds Championships.

Since game is getting bigger and will get even bigger in the future, new players are
appearing and newer sets are coming to Spain. My source is hopeful that there
will be Organized Play when a new rotation takes place, where they’ll have
almost all sets in their national language. There are no age group division in
Spain due the fact that the player amounts are still very low.

There aren't any players in Spain that almost everyone knows of, what my other source thinks are
good players at his area such as Arturo Oviedo for being one of the best
players at Madrid and for winning a Yu-gi-oh tournament at Worlds 2010,or Marco
Casero for opening the first Spanish singles store, www.coleccionistapokemon.com .

The number of players in one of my sources’ area was almost non-existent. He
remembers that, when he played my first tournament back in July, the average
was hardly about 4-5 people. After they began to promote the game through their
blog and spread the word, the number raised to a solid 22-23 people in a matter
of a few months. He has no doubt that the potential for this game in the country
is high, and that it can keep growing up. They made that much progress in just
a few months, and he’s sure more people would be interested if there would be
official tournaments in Spain.

The age division’s percentages go about like this in Spain: 85% Masters, 5%
Seniors, 10% Juniors.

This year a Spanish team wnt to Arnhem for the European Challenge Cup for their
first Play!Pokémon tournament. Mostly made of players from Madrid, the team had
10 Masters, 1 Senior and 1 Junior. Their best result in Masters was 5-3, so no
Masters were able to reach the top32. However, they still had a great time
because their Junior player Raúl Peña Azcueta finished 4th in his
first P!P tournament. The other Spanish players worth of mention are the
rest group who went to the ECC: Marco Casero, Damián Broens, Antonio Peña
(PokéDad, father of Raúl Peña), Fernando Picatoste, José Yago de Alberto,
Fernando Márquez, Jerónimo Márquez and Álvaro Carpio.

My source thinks Spanish players do have the potential to play and build
decks at an international level, now their objective is Worlds and they are
working to get to that goal. In only one year the player base has grown a lot
and it will keep growing even more.

Conclusion

As you can see Spain has a lot of potential. It’s a big country with a lot
of people so the potential for Pokémon TCG is huge for Spain. Getting an
Organized Play in Spain would probably help them to get even more players just
like my sources think and I’m impressed how much volunteer work, the players
have already done to promote the game for new players. I’ve been there myself
because I was there when we started to build the Pokémon TCG community of
Finland from a scratch. And when I look at what the Finnish players and
community has achieved worldwide, I have no doubts about Spain’s success as
long as PCI gives the OP. I encourage PCI to give Spanish players a chance to
grow their community by giving an Organized Play to them!

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments!

P.S. Remember that there will be a third update this week and it’ll be the
first entry of the “Ask Esa” –series. It’ll probably be published somewhere
around Friday.

Very good article about our country, but there are some mistakes about it.

First of all, as far as I know, there are no city which plays EX or DP-on nowadays. There are some communities where they use open format (Base-on), because there are very few players and they try to get back old players who used to play back when we had OP, but with the intention of changing to official format when able.

Secondly, in Barcelona we don't use only Spanish cards. English and Japanese cards had been always allowed, and since a month or so ago, ND can be used in tournament (the expansion arrives in our language in May 9th). There are some people (like me) who prefer to buy cards in our language (for collector purposes), but we have no problem on using English ones.

On the other hand, I feel the website www.cartaspokemon.es is getting underrated in this article, since it was the first Spanish Pokémon TCG Website, and also have information about, latest news of the TCG in Spanish and OP, tournaments, decklists, articles... and have also a forum to discuss.

I'd like, with the purpose of improving the information of this article (which I think, with all respect, is not accurate at all), to contact the writter of this article to discuss the topic and explain all I can about the misinformation.

Again, thanks for giving room for Spanish players on the Pokémon TCG community, and hope we get OP after Worlds :)

The information given about tournaments in Barcelona is totally wrong. I am heading the tournaments in that city, and we play almost once a week, not twice a month as it's said. And we not only play with Spanish cards, but also with English and Japanese.

I don't know who gave you all this information, but it's not accurate at all. Maybe your contacts are not 100% objetive about the state in all the country.

Thanks for all the comments and contacts, I'll be making a Spain part 2 next week with the fixes, I've gotten from all the Spanish players. I must thank you all for your activity. It seems that things are heating up in Spain.

Anyways, the next Eye on Japan article will be probably before Worlds, once I am able to find a new contact from Japan (the former one moved to China for one year).

Thanks for all the comments and from now, please keep the discussion fair and square. I still have Google translator, you know.

It will be only a mini-article correcting the errors in this article. And don't worry, I don't want to be reading about poop-fights either! Thankfully it was a VGC player and not all Spanish players aren't like that. Also, The UK entry will be released next week as well!

Well, sorry, I live in Barcelona, and participated in European Tournament. I am a new player, and went to Arnhem when it took less than a year playing. The atmosphere seemed great, and I made many friends. In spite, but to be the only person in Barcelona to go, I know many others who have tried but failed. The information we have is partial, and does not work as not even in the bulls and culture (Here in Catalonia the bulls are illegal). Here in Barcelona we are about 50 players, from juniors to masters, not yet having all the means at our disposal, we played with care, and take everything in every tournament, which incidentally is one a week. And although I have not played more, that I want removed, and make a discreet role in Arnehm. So I challenge those who wish, to come to Barcelona, ​​go with their art, food, and for participating in a tournament and see if it will be easy to win.

Just read your article. I'm not a fan of the TCG myself, but find it sad that TCG never got it right in Spain. Previous distributor apparently was the cause.

I attended Spain VGC last Saturday and there were some TCG players at a stand. These people had contacted Asmodee / TPCi so they were allowed to hold a stand during the VGC tournament. I talked to a girl as I was covering the event for the official Nintendo magazine in Spain and found this interesting. This initiative and the ones you mentioned on your article may push the TCG forward in Spain.

It's hilarious that Malta has one representative at Worlds each year, and Spain simply doesn't. It's time to change that.

Hey, now that i see Melkor's post i have to say as this a fun fact, Senior's VGC Champion of Spain Miguel is also a TCG player, nice guy and strong player too! i've played in tournaments with him, he uses a strong Eelektrik deck right now.

Thanks Esa, I really appreciate this article, we wish having the OP soon :)

Only one point, I'm from Barcelona too, and we usually play 3/4 tournaments in a month, what's more, our TCG skills are improving every day, and finally there're people with a lot of potential here in Barcelona and Tarragona. Yeah, it's true that there're lots of rogue decks, and that's funny too, and as you said before, there are some rogues that work really good. Remember, we play pokemon for fun ^^

The Madrid comunity is a little bit active than us, and we work together, including the rest of the country, to show to the world the Pokemon TCG

yes, I know it, and you?are you from barcelona? I don't think so... let us know your name mr. anonymus, if you're so cutesorry Esa for comments like those, in every part of the world there exist a single person that wants to hurt a great united community, and I'm already waiting for your second part, I'll be really pleased!

Barcelona? I'm not even from Spain son. And sorry, i won't give you my name, i'm straight.In your post you are implying that rogue deck means a terrible deck, and that's wrong, as wrong as a smartass Senior can get.Can't wait for part 2 to see these rogues, i will have a good laugh.

I never mention any deck, so how you know how are our decks?? Don't say nothing if you don't know anything about us, we're fighting to get the OP, don't disturb us mr. anonymusI'll stop arguing right now, that's rubish for this website